Viral Ad Network

Developing websites that work across different operating systems and web browsers is notoriously tough work.

To help make building and maintaining sites as painless as possible for all of our ad publishers, we’re releasing our stats on web browser usage over the past year – anonymously collected from the millions of views across our ad network.

These statistics all show the percentage of users we detected using each browser. All statistics represent the share each browser had over the entire year.

Overall Browser statistics

No massive news here – Internet Explorer has over 50% market share – with Firefox coming in at just over 30%. Safari comes in third, and Google Chrome (and Chromium) coming in fourth.

Perhaps surprisingly, Opera usage is quite noticeable – helped by the usage of Opera Mini on mobile devices.

Web Browsers used across our network in 2009

Breakdown by version of Internet Explorer

The good news here is that we saw very few users using IE4 / IE5 (although there were some) – the bad news is that IE6 is still around, and many of our publishers may still have to support IE6 well into 2010.

Obviously IE8 was only available in March ’09 – so it’s average usage over the past year might well not reflect the true market share now accurately.

Internet Explorer browser usage broken down

Web Browser share on Windows 7

I’m including this chart because of how incredible I find this data.

Perhaps the early adopters of Windows 7 are the most tech-savy, perhaps the early adopters of Windows 7 are also the people most likely to update their browsers – or perhaps it’s a sign of things to come – but increadibly, Internet Explorer seems to have taken a back-seat in web browsers used on Windows 7.

In fact, we’ve found that (among the Windows 7 users we’ve seen this year) – Firefox took Internet Explorer’s place as browser of choice at 50% market share – followed by IE8 at 30% (the same place Firefox appears across users in general) – followed by Chrome in third place.

Web Browsers used by Windows 7 users in 2009

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 2nd, 2009 at 3:25 pm and is filed under News, Publishers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.